WASHINGTON – What do a Mickey Mouse snow globe, a dummy grenade and a food processor have in common?
They all shut down parts of major California airports in the past nine days, thanks to a federally certified baggage scanner that mistook the items for bombs.
The latest false alarm took place this morning when a CTX 5500 detected a suspicious item in luggage and forced another evacuation at Los Angeles International Airport.
“A food processor triggered the alarm on the CTX,” LAX spokesman Harold Johnson told WorldNetDaily.com.
A CTX 5500 was also blamed for Monday’s unnecessary and costly evacuation of thousands of passengers from LAX, which delayed flights. The million-dollar scanner spotted the image of what looked to be a live explosive in a checked bag, but it turned out to be a replica hand grenade.
That came on the heels of a similar bomb scare at Sacramento International Airport on Feb. 26, when a $700,000 CTX 2500 confused a Disney toy for a bomb.
Johnson says there are eight CTX machines at LAX, the nation’s fourth-busiest airport, and more are on their way.
The Transportation Department Wednesday placed a $170
million order for 100 of Invision Technologies Inc.’s
CTX 5500 and CTX 2500 models, plus parts for 300
additional units, and is expected to spend possibly
billions of dollars more on the machines to meet a
year-end deadline to scan all checked bags for bombs.
Critics warn that airport evacuations, which can cost airlines millions of dollars in delayed flights, will become routine as the government deploys the machines throughout the nation’s 429 airports.
They say the CTX models – which are designed to detect the density of objects, but not their chemical content – often mistake dense items like cheese and chocolate for explosives. A Defense Department official recently testified that CTX machines used at two Washington airports had double the rate of false positives allowed by federal standards.
Competitors say their bomb-detecting equipment, such as an explosives-residue “sniffer,” is more reliable.
But in a WorldNetDaily.com interview, InVision spokeswoman Alisa Hicks suggested that CTX operators may have been at least partly to blame for recent goofs at Los Angeles and Sacramento airports.
“The system is both a machine and a person operating it,” she said. “Humans play an important role in the process.”
Hicks says InVision, based in Newark, Calif., has no control over the training of baggage screeners.
“We make the machines to government specs,” she said. “How personnel is run is outside InVision’s scope.”
As for the critics, “they can say what they want to say,” Hicks said, “but their technology has not passed certification.”
“CTX is the single best technology out there,” she asserted.
How does it work? Some of the technology, such as the
bomb-ID software, is classified, Hicks says.
But simply put, luggage goes through two chambers in the truck-sized CTX machines, Hicks says. The first chamber uses X-ray technology to peer through objects and then projects that image to a computer monitored by the screener.
Then the bag, carried by a conveyor belt, goes through a second chamber that uses a CT (computed tomography)-like scanner to take a series of cross-sections of the bag and its contents, she says. That image is projected onto another computer screen.
At this point, InVision’s proprietary – and classified – software kicks in, running the image against a library of density matches for various bombs selected by federal law enforcement. A match triggers a visual alert on the computer screen.
The operator is then supposed to double-check the X-ray image of that item for a detonator, Hicks says. If the item is sufficiently suspicious, the operator is then trained to “resolve” the item by removing it from the luggage to make sure it’s not, in fact, a bomb.
Though it can’t “sniff” for chemicals, it’s the only technology that meets all the government’s criteria, Hicks points out.
Those criteria include: reliable detection of a wide spectrum of explosives, a high so-called “through-put” rate and a low false-positive rate. And the bag-scanning process has to be done automatically.
There’s no doubt that the CTX machines scan bags faster than explosives-trace detectors, or “sniffers,” which are manually operated.
But the reliability of the machines has come under serious question.
The false-positive rate of machines at some airports is 30 percent or higher – well above the commonly accepted norm of 20 percent for such machines.
Hicks would not disclose the maximum false-positive rate allowed by the government in its contract with InVision.
“Those specs are secret,” she said.
Nor would she share any of the company’s internal data regarding CTX false positives.
L-3 Communications Inc. of New York makes a bomb-detecting system using a technology related to InVision’s, and it’s also certified by the government.
But if theirs are the only government-approved systems, it doesn’t seem to impress the Secret Service or Capitol Police.
They use far cheaper devices not certified by the government to protect the White House and Congress from bombs.
Previous stories:
Airport evacuations due to errant bomb-scanners
CTX bomb screeners ignore ‘alarmed’ luggage
Families at risk
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